


It happens too slow. It happens too fast.

by Gemini_Baby



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Baby Dick Grayson, Dick Grayson Needs a Hug, Dick Grayson Whump, Dick Grayson-centric, Gen, Haly's Circus, Panic, Panic Attacks, a brief mention and allusion to animal death, bad attitude of people towards circus folks, brief mention of regretting being alive (its only one line), brief mention of self-hatred, dead bodies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2020-10-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:21:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27081127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gemini_Baby/pseuds/Gemini_Baby
Summary: Dick just wanted the act, the last performance of the evening to end soon, so he could sleep.He never thought that the act would end like this and two people he loved the most would be eternally sleeping by the end of it.
Relationships: Dick Grayson & Bruce Wayne, Dick Grayson & John Grayson, Dick Grayson & Mary Grayson
Comments: 2
Kudos: 57
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	It happens too slow. It happens too fast.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AuroraKant](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuroraKant/gifts).



> Many thanks to Shell (neptunedance) for the beta help with the fic and making it a lot better. Love you 💞
> 
> I hope you love it Aurora ♥

The last act, the most dangerous one and a large reason for many people to buy the circus’ tickets, is about to start. Dick would love to be a part of that act. His parents have not yet permitted him to perform the last act with them, despite Dick’s insistence that he is a big boy now. They say it is too dangerous and risky. Dick wants to protest, to say that it is also dangerous and risky for them. But this is the family business, one his family has been doing for decades.

He wishes them the best of luck. His mother looks at him, with softness and love reflected in her eyes along with the reflection of light from the many small bright coloured lights illuminating the circus.

His father ruffles his hair,  _ “We will go back to our tents, after this act. It has been a long night, isn’t it? You need to rest.” _ Dick asks,  _ “Can I stay for the last act?” _ He feels something twisting in his gut, and he doesn't want to go back to their place right now, no matter how sleepy he is feeling. He does not want his parents to disappear from the focus of his eyes even for a second.

_ “You look sleepy” _ , his mother says.

_ “Please”,  _ he protests with eyes too big and puts it into the posture that yes, he is sleepy but he wants his Mother and Father to be with him, wants them to tuck him in, wants to hear his mother’s lullaby before sleeping. He wants to hear his father’s anecdotes.

He wants to hear his father’s huffing complaints about how supposedly “civilized” city people have no manners and civility at all, and how they love to throw garbage at the initially cleaned place of people whom they love to call  _ “dirty” _ ,  _ “untidy”, “uncivilized”.  _ The irony is….ironic? There are other words too, which his father doesn’t repeat, either because of the nature of those words or because Dick is usually around, those times. Dick doesn’t know what those words mean exactly but he understands the intent, the bite and the taunts just fine. He may be a child, but he is no fool.

Dick takes a deep breath. He just heard some more venom dripping words a few minutes ago. He hugs his parents and goes to the side standing there. The act is going to start soon and he has no wish to be a distraction.

The act starts. It is beautiful. Dick has watched it a thousand times before and it is still mesmerizing.

_ Flying Graysons  _ fly in the air. The crowd cheers.

All the world's a stage. They are the performers. And air is their element.

Gravity...is their frenemy.

Dick is surprised because where did that last thought come from?

His mother is going back and forth right now. Soon she would leave her hold and fly towards his father, who would catch his mother. And then there would be some twirls, some leaning back, some back and forth…

He feels something weird. There is a strange sound. Might be from the crowd. They might be opening glass bottles despite the explicit rules to not bring glass bottles here. He hears it again. It is not coming from down though. It is coming from maybe in front of him. He is alone here. Where is the sound coming from?

He looks at where his feet are. Something might be there, on the surface. He looks at the surface with a newfound interest. A mouse wouldn’t be here. Or rather it shouldn’t be here. Mice usually roam on the grounds, not this high above the ground. It is a circus, Dick thinks, maybe the mouse came here to get recruited. Dick is amused at the thought. This is Gotham City. from the stories he (over)heard from his elders when they were arriving, it is not too much of a stretch. The thought sends a shudder down his spine and the next sound makes the hair on his neck stand.

The noise is not coming from the surface he is standing on.

Dick is pretty sure he would not have been able to listen to that sound had he been standing with other people or somewhere else.

He wants the act to end. He is getting more sleepy and hence irritated.

He looks ahead, where his parents are performing; flying in the air and dancing with the wind. 

He has seen the act many times before. He tries to see which trick they are performing right now. Trying to determine how much time is left.

He looks and there is something clawing at him inside, for some reason all he hears is not the crowd cheering or talking, he hears the thumping of his heart. There is a lump in his throat and Dick is blinking very fast.

The act they are performing right now is the second last trick of the evening.

Dick looks up. The bars are swaying. Or is it only his head swaying to a side because of exhaustion?

The little lights suddenly become larger, distorted and covering his view. He blinks. He really needs to sleep.

He feels that something bad is about to happen. He just might fall asleep here. That might be a bad thing that he is dreading would happen?

The last performance; the last trick of their final act, of the evening starts. And instead of the joy Dick usually feels when they are about to end their performances, he feels dread. He is himself confused.

The act is beautiful. Dick has watched it a thousand times before. It is mesmerizing. It has never ended like this before.

The ending is  _ wrong _ .

_ Wrong. _

  
  


_ wrongwrongwrongwrong _

__

It happens too slow. It happens too fast.

The screws have given up, and his parents are falling.

Dick rushes forward, in the childish hope that maybe he can catch them. His brain tells him that despite him defying gravity, he doesn’t have wings.

He races down to the ground.

He can surely catch them, right? Right?

The ground beneath him is swallowing him whole and his mind is screaming “ _ too late”, “toolatetoolate”, “you are too late!” _

  
  


His whole world has been shattered and he is still hearing the echoes of his world shattering into tiny pieces like glass shards. The bitter reality digs into him like wood splinters dig into bare feet. Ice is freezing him from inside. He doesn’t feel like he has a heart in his body anymore, yet he keeps hearing the loud hammering of heartbeats. That is all his ears hear. 

Even when he can see the moving lips of many people, some of them addressing him, calling out for him. But it is not only about  _ can’t hear _ . It is also about how every sound is trying to reach him except the two voices he wants to hear.

He sees a crowd, uniforms, jackets, cameras and microphones. That is not what he keeps seeing. His mind keeps replaying the  _ scene _ in front of his eyes. One time, Two times. First is slower as compared to the second time. ThreeFourFIve. They are faster. It happens; it keeps playing like a video on loop, and without a break, it started repeating in his head, and then kept repeating. Becoming more and more violent. More blood and even more broken bones than there actually were, when it happened in reality.

They fell and Dick could do nothing...but watch. And for some reason, his brain has decided to play the cruelty card. It memorized the scene with perfect detail. Every detail; scene to scene, inch to inch, blood to blood, bones to bones, shouts and screams, the creaking sounds of the bodies hitting the floor... _ and breaking.  _ (That is the only sound he keeps hearing now. It keeps ringing in his ears.) His brain is loving to add more gore to what happened. Dick wants it all to stop. He doesn’t want to hear these horrifying sounds anymore. He doesn’t want to see the dead bodies anymore.

The world just took away everything and everyone Dick had. The world is making him cry. Dick won’t be able to hear his father’s laughs anymore. Everyone around him is shouting. Dick won’t be able to hear his mother’s lullabies and songs anymore.

_ ‘My robin’, _ his mother had said in the morning. Robin and spring, something they loved. Too bad that the red roses blooming in spring will forever be tainted with the blood of his parents in his memory.

He blinks. He keeps blinking.

_ This is not real. _

_ The world where his parents left him behind, not taking him, even if they were migrating to another realm was not real! _

He steps forward. His legs move on their own, and he reaches the bodies. He kneels down and holds them, or at least tries to hold what is left of them. There is a lump in his throat and something that reminisces a heart keeps beating loudly in his ears. He holds them. There are some efforts by some people trying to drag him away from the bodies. He doesn’t budge.  _ Because he wouldn’t _ . They took his parents away from him. Do they want to take away this chance of the last hug, this last embrace too? He would not let them take anything away from him. Not anymore.

He holds them. Hugs them. The sounds he hears next, he doesn’t register them at first. They sound alien. They sound loud. Shrieks and sobs. He hears and hears. He doesn’t know how long it takes him to just hear and hear and later realize that those sounds are coming from him. He is the one shrieking, shouting and sobbing.

When they feel like he has hugged them to his heart’s content, they make their move again. But this time, they don’t pull Dick away. Instead, they start dragging his family's’ bodies away from him, snatching what all was left of his parents, of his family  _ away from him _ . Their fingers which he had tangled his own with; when the bodies are dragged away, the fingers in his hands are pulled away too, like when a piece of net cloth gets tangled on the gems of a watch and gets ripped away when either the cloth or the watch is pulled without care.

His life is like a net cloth, isn’t it? Spread on the thorns and tugged away harshly, leaving him with the broken pieces of his life; that ripped net cloth behind.

The irony is had there been a net, his life may have never ended up like a torn net cloth.

They pull the bodies away, place them on some mockery of a bed and start loading them in a vehicle. That is when reality hits again, a hundred times more with its impact.  _ This is the last time he has seen them. And he may not be able to see their faces, see them on their burial day, or before they are buried. _

There are sounds, lots of sounds. They seem like they are coming from somewhere far far away. Like from people standing on a peak to someone standing below a cliff. The sounds are coming from afar, yet he also hears a ringing in his ears. The red siren light on a couple of vehicles start rotating, and Dick distantly thinks that it is  _ just like the state of his head right now _ . Spinning and spinning.

The world is swaying and Dick feels like he is losing his balance even though he is standing straight and digging the feet of his balls even more on the ground now. It seems like gravity has found an interesting object to play with, to lower it to the ground and right now, it feels like that object is Dick’s head. It feels heavy and the gravity is showing a strange interest in Dick right now, trying to pull him down.  _ Ha! _ It is not like he is not already struggling in a swamp having difficulty in catching airs in his lungs.

The world keeps spinning, his ears keep ringing and his head feels like a sack filled with rocks. His throat feels constricted. Icicles planting themselves in his heart and growing and spreading inside him, reaching into his throat, constricting it. They feel like big lumps there, in his throat. His legs, below his knees, are frozen, on the spot. Both from inside and outside. His thighs and the back of his legs are throbbing. His heart keeps beating loudly. He knows that he has a heart because the too loud and too awry rhythm of the heartbeats ringing in his ears keeps reminding him that. Because otherwise, he feels numb. 

Unfeeling. Unmoving.

_ Alive _ . His mind supplies. And he hates the last part.

He doesn’t mind being unfeeling. He doesn’t want to feel anything for the rest of his life anyway.

Unmoving. He used to move  _ with his parents, with his family. _ What is in moving without them anyway?

_ Alive. _ What is life without them?

He wants to run away and hide from the world. He wants his uncles and aunts and Pop Haly to hug him. He reaches out towards them. They are all who he is left.

Some people sneer, trying to block his way and not let his extended family approach him. He wants...well, who cares what Dick wants anyways, he thinks bitterly.

Pop Haly put a hand on his head. His eyes are wet, full of sadness and regret, Dick notices when he looks up at him to meet his eyes. Pop Haly kneels down. He extends his arms. Some people around them again sneer and try to pull Pop away too, away from Dick, just like they pulled his parents away from him.

Dick blinks rapidly. Pop Haly extends his arms and Dick’s body automatically crashes to the chest of his grandfather figure. His head is tucked under the chin. Pop Haly rocks him lightly. “I am sorry”, he tries to say to Dick. Dick wants to scream he didn’t kill his family. This city did. These sneering people did. Greed did. Injustice did. 

“I have got you kid”, he whispers near Dick’s ear. Dick mourns the fact that it does not sound like a promise, that it actually sounds like an afraid statement. “I have got you”, they also say that to the animals around here when they are close to dying. They hold those animals close, and whisper they have got them. Pet them, hug them. The parallels make the tears well up even more in Dick’s eyes.

_ What is the difference? Except that he is not the one dying? At least not physically.  _

He feels dead inside though.

He wants to scream.

He wants to go back to their tent, ask his mother to make the soup. The one he didn’t like that much and always got his father to team up with him and have something else instead, in addition to it. He will promise his mother to eat that soup.  _ He will even ask for a second bowl! _

He wants to climb his father’s shoulders and visit all the tents. His father never says no to Dick when Dick climbs or asks to climb his shoulders. Sometimes, when Dick feels sad or gets hurt during training, he comes to Dick himself, kneels down, places him on his shoulders, a leg on each, holds his hands with both his own and will give him a whole round across the whole ground. Where is his father? He wants his father! His father always has had the Dad Signal ™ of knowing that Dick is in pain, or he is feeling sad, or that he has been hurt. He is feeling all three right now. He just wants his Dad to come  _ now _ and kneel down in front of him, pulling Dick towards his chest, planting a kiss on his forehead, ruffle his hair and place him on his shoulders and take him for a walk.

  
  


There are more arms wrapped around him now. His family. His extended family, he realizes. Everyone from the circus, except his mom and dad.

They hold him. He screams. He sobs. And he surprises himself. His forehead feels heavy, some nerves seem ready to burst. A web feels like it is in his throat, constricting it, his head sways towards the right side of the ground, his heart is beating too slow and too fast, his limbs such as his legs and hands are throbbing, and he is fixed in one place.

The van with the bodies, with the last remnants of his family, is starting to leave. Dick tries to scream but he has no voice or no sound left. He ends up heaving for air. 

They have brought the animals forward, he realizes as his uncles and aunts make some room by loosening their arms around him but not letting him go completely.

Eleanor and Zitka, the elephants; his best friends, wrap their trunks around him in a hug. He is making them sad too, isn’t he? They shouldn’t be sad. They shouldn’t be the one looking ready to cry. They should be happy! Dick shouldn’t be sucking out their joy and liveliness. He swallows. He hates himself.

“We have got you.”, “We will care for you”, “You are not alone” are said to him, promises in hushed whispers.

The fall keeps repeating in his memory. Some part of him is loving to torture himself with that. Because that is the last thing he remembers them doing, the last thing about them and of them ingrained in his brain. And he wants to preserve everything about his parents.

“Well actually the boy is not going anywhere”, an authoritative and overconfident voice cuts in. as if it has any authority in a family matter.

Their posture is self-assured. They think their nose belongs here.

“This is our kid. He won’t be staying here, in Gotham City”, Pop Haly answers, and some arms tighten around him. Either to reassure him or to stop him from running away, Dick isn’t sure. He needed them though. He needs both; reassurance and the need to run away. He wants to run away, wants to run so fast that he reaches the time where his parents are with him.

“The circus would be under investigation”, they say or rather punch out and add, “and the kid would go into foster care.”

“He is our kid. We will raise him”, is a voice from behind him.

“You are unfit to raise a kid”, they start walking towards Dick, no doubt they are going to pull him away, going to snatch him away like they snatched his parents from him some moments ago. He wills the ground to swallow him. The ground doesn’t listen. Is it really the time to show him ‘mercies’ like this?

“We raised him and  _ we can raise him. _ ”

“That is not for you to decide.”

They again proceed towards Dick, fingers clawing at his shoulders, pulling him away. It hurts where their fingers dig.

People behind him tighten their hold on him, not letting him be pulled away. “You are hurting him.”

“If you all continue to resist, it would prove the fishy things going on in the circus are true and that you killed your own performers.”

_ Killed their own performers? That is not all they are to each other! They are family.  _

_ But what would these people know who threaten to put the crew in jail because they tried to protest the mishandling of a child and cited that they are unfit to raise him. _

A circus which has raised generations is unable to raise another child according to them.

They all try.

Sometimes all you can do is try. Success is not always there.

  
  


_ “But why try at all, Mom?” _

_ “Because unless you won’t try, you can’t fly.” _

A distant memory echoes in his head.

And in reliving that memory right now, he somehow missed that he is on his feet now and there are other people around him.

His family comes towards him. One last hug for him. The man whose fingers still feel digging in Dick’s shoulder snarls and tries to stop them. He is sent away by another man. Grey hair, long coat, glasses, and exhaustion written all over him.

He lets Dick’s family embrace him, for one last time. He lets them say their wishes and prayers.

They are then taken away to another side, to be interrogated. Reluctance to leave Dick behind bleeds in their postures.

  
  


The old and exhausted man from earlier puts a hesitant hand on Dick’s shoulder. His fingers don’t dig. They don’t hurt. The man seems to read that. He pulls Dick a bit behind. He is close to Dick but not directly behind him. Dick is towards his right leg. It could be called a pseudo hug, if Dick’s world was not bleeding and shattering.

“It is going to be okay.”

Dick knows neither of them believes it.

Dick will try though. He will fly. He wants to preserve everything about his parents, doesn’t he? Flying was one of them! He is not going to give up. He will try to fly. To preserve what is left of them.

His breaths starts coming rapidly again. Then a man comes and kneels in front of him. The old man behind him doesn’t fall into the defensive posture like he did earlier when it was the other man. These two men, however, know each other.

The man kneels in front of him. And widens his arms. Asks his name and Dick can’t stop his tongue, “Dick”.

“Dick”, he calls him softly and adds that he understands Dick’s pain.  _ No one understands Dick’s pain.  _ The man continues, tells him that he does not know what Dick is exactly going through and he understands that he doesn’t understand Dick’s pain.  _ This is confusing! _ He tells him he faced something similar, wants to help Dick.

The man is kneeling in front of him, arms spread wide, offering him a hug. “Only if you want it.”

He reminds him of his dad and Dick’s breathing heaves, he stumbles forward and wraps his arm around the man. The man had earlier introduced himself as Bruce. He tucks Dick’s head under his chin. He lets him cry. Rubs his back, smooths his hair, but he never shushes him.

When Dick has stopped crying, and it feels like hours have passed, the man asks the old man what they are going to do for Dick.

The old man, whom Bruce addressed as commissioner, answers that Dick is going to be sent to the foster system. His tone carries that even he doesn’t want that.

Bruce asks Dick if he would like to go with him instead.

Dick says yes. And Bruce again pulls him in a hug.

  
  


Dick’s exhaustion catches up and soon he finds himself blanketed out in the darkness.

  
  


“ _ Why do we even try?” _

_ “We would never be able to fly otherwise” _

His mother’s voice rings in his ears.

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos, comments and bookmarks are always welcome and appreciated.


End file.
